This Gospel spot
started the LifeLine Productions ministry. We had one station
playing our material. Pretty soon, several people called and
requested the transcript of this Gospel spot. It never occurred
to us that people would want to use our scripts, so we started
selling them to finance the radio ministry.

A majority of the time
we use sound effects to accentuate the idea. This time we were out
of ideas and were sitting around listening to our sound effect
library when we started listening to the musical section. We knew we
had to figure out a way to use them, so we came up with
"Background Music."

I have a friend, who
became the Best Man at my wedding. We used to work alone in a warehouse
together. Every day, we would spend our break time and lunch
time playing Backgammon. To make the game more interesting, we
added the rule that you could move backwards when rolling snake
eyes. After my friend moved several states away, he asked me to
write him a spot that, when he heard it, he would know I was
thinking about him and our friendship.

Our biggest argument at LLP was over this spot. Do pickles
taste sour or bitter? After an hour of intense discussion, we decided
to call information. We gave the operator two options on the taste of
pickles, sour or bitter. Sour won...thank you.

This was something I
read on the internet. I'm SURE it's true. Note the generic
description of the ship we use, "Large naval ship". When
we wrote this radio spot, our material just started to be aired
internationally, so we felt we needed to generalize the
description.
We face many choices such as this. Do we say miles or kilometers? We
usually end up saying, "Very far."

When we first started
out, we wanted to present the Gospel in such a way that a secular
audience would listen and not turn us off. We felt that meant we
couldn't use Christian words like Jesus, Bible, God, Salvation,
Cross, etc.
These were the first three we came up with. Wealth was the first one
we wrote. After much frustration, we decided to just go with
whatever idea we had. It was then that the ministry started to
grow.

It struck me one day
that once we hear the Gospel message, we will be judged by what we
do with that information. As Christians, we can't assume everyone
has heard the Gospel, so we just wanted to make a radio spot that
presented the Gospel and the choices or dilemma that it posed to the
listener.

Okay, every third letter does not spell "FORGOBLOTTEN", but
it was late and we were tired and that just sounded like the funniest
word in the world.
We get more calls about this spot from people who are ardent
supporters of the "Bible Code", which claims to look for
modern day prophecies by analyzing the patterns in the letters of the
original Hebrew. They believe this spot is a jab at them, but
honestly we wrote this long before we ever heard of the "Bible
Code".

Like most of the radio spots we write, we get our ideas from real
life. Both Kirt and I have kids who are starting to drive. I had to
tell my boy that, "It really wasn't that bad" so he wouldn't
get a complex. He got his license and I'm closer to God, so it all
worked out well for everybody.

This script was almost written verbatim by Ann Graham Lotz. In an
interview with Larry King, she responded to the question "why," referring
to the events of 9/11. She responded, "You know, we've
turned back to God in a way. We're calling on Him. We have a little
phrase 'God Bless America' everywhere, which is refreshing, because
after 1963, basically we've told God to get out of our schools, and
we've told Him to get out of the marketplace, get out of our
businesses, get out of our government. And you know, it's all right if
he stays in church or in a synagogue, but we've not wanted Him on the
streets."
It was very inspiring to us, plus it was an easy script to write.

I got this idea from reading the book, "Sacred Diary of
Adrian Plass", a good book if you can find it.

By the way, have you ever started a joke without thinking about the
punch line first? About mid way through the joke you think to
yourself, "Wait a minute! This may not be an appropriate
joke to tell my Pastor."